Ecclectic Electives, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Black Man

Things we learned from this election:

• Apparently birthday candle wishes do come true.
  
• If the GOP truly had some influence over the electronic voting machines, they either didn't exercise it or it was a crazy landslide.
• There's a huge divide in the left between the secular liberals and the religious liberals. This isn't new, and it's been used to influence elections through ballot measures, but this time the ballot measure was killed by the election. It's entirely possible that if you transported Jesus or any of his contemporaries through time to the present that they wouldn't approve of homosexuality, but they'd also be put off by women in positions of power, a classless society and the concept of a free election where any non-felon of age can vote regardless of his or her contribution to or status in society.
  
• Republicans can be surprisingly gracious in defeat and even occasionally optimistic.
• Every "red state" has a "blue state" in it trying to get out. Except Utah.

My favorite post-election conservative comment came from Chris Wallace of wacko dude on Fox News fame on The Daily Show, saying what an amazing thing it was for the U.S. to elect a black man and comparing it to France electing an Algerian as president. Setting aside the dozens of ways to interpret that after-the-fact as an insult to african-americans, it was a genuinely warm sentiment.

I'm feeling a little guilty in this new (and likely fleeting) time of cooperation and understanding and what-not to take pleasure in the in-fighting over on the right. This election truly split the GOP apart... if they'd won they would have been able to keep on keeping on, but now you have the far righty's bitching about McCain and the moderates bitching about Palin. I find it hard to believe that the party will be able to rally around anyone as religously (in the christian sense, not 'ardently') conservative as GWBush, but at the same time, I don't think the conservative morality crowd is going to support anyone who isn't one of them. I don't know who it is, but I feel pretty certain that it's not any of the crowd who ran this year. Maybe it's Orrin Hatch's turn.